At the 2008 NASS Conference in St. Louis MO, Fred Sawyer presented the 2008 Sawyer Dialing Prize to Kate Pond “for the success of her World Sculpture Project. This project has brought dialing, an appreciation of light and shadow and new connections between traditional art and science to children and adults in countries and cultures around the world.” The prize consisted of a certificate, a cash award, and a specially commissioned trophy Spectra Sundial by Jim Tallman.

Kate Pond presented a summary of her award winning world project. “My sculpture invites participation: with people, and with the sun, shadows and alignments at different seasons of the year. The position of the sun, moon, and stars create a structure for me, like a painter might use a rectangle as a frame of reference.” The first sculpture of her project “ZigZag”, is a simple elegant pipe structure that tracks the time from 10 am to 2 pm on the equinox at latitude 45 degrees, the border between Canada and the US at the dial’s location, Stanstead Quebec. The next sculpture was SOLEKKO at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Oslo, Norway. Here the sculpture is a triangular cone that casts no shadow at noon on the equinox. All the projects involved children actively playing and learning and included time capsules with art and their messages for the future. Other sculptures were created in Japan, Hawaii, and New Zealand. This last sculpture “Telling Stones” used stone alignments for the rising and setting of summer and winter solstices, equinox, and the rising of the Pleiades in June (the Matariki marking the Maori new year) and the rising of Antares (the Maori, Rehua), at the beginning of summer in December. You can find more of Kate Pond’s works at http://www.vermontsculpture.com/